About Me

Dad Joke
- Why did the nearsighted man fall in the well?
- He couldn’t see that well!
Programming provides exciting opportunities for social scientists
- Digital data is exploding and programming is required to do research at scale
- Algorithms mediate more and more interactions and understanding programming can help us to analyze them
- Computational methods let us do new things
- NLP
- Simulation
- Large-scale experiments
- There is value in “thinking like a computer”
Goals
- Learn basic programming
- Be able to collect and visualize data from the web
- Present computational research
- Read and evaluate computational social science research
This is an intense “bootcamp” intended to teach the basics of skills used by computational social scientists
- It’s going to be intense! :)
- But we can do it!
- Week 1: Python for Everybody
- Week 2: Pandas, visualizations, and APIs
- Week 3: Data cleaning, version control, etc.
- Week 4: Work on final project
Day-to-day
- Example paper
- One person will present each day + lead discussion
- Others will skim
- Lecture
- Recorded lecture on coding topic
- Notebook to follow along - download and run each day
- Class time focused on counfusions + Coding Challenges
- Coding Challenges
- Random “cold calling” for reviewing solutions
- 5-10 minutes in small groups to prepare
- Let me know what isn’t working
Synchronous classes
- 1 PM - discussion of example paper
- ~1:30 - review of concepts/homework questions
- ~2:30 - Co-working / office hours
- OH by appointment
Coding Challenges
- Exercises from the book
- Jupyter Notebooks
- Suggested approach:
- Try on your own
- Work with a partner
- Ask questions on Discord
- Surround code with three backticks (```)
- Look up solutions (where available)
Final Project
- Default option
- Jupyter notebook
- Methods + result section of paper
- Replication?
- Do what is best for your future goals
Project Milestones
- Final project
- Really quickly identify a dataset and general plan (Week 1)
- Project planning doc (Week 2)
- Project presentation + report (Week 4)
Grades
- Goal is learning
- Two self-assessment reflections
Wiki
- Schedule
- Links to readings
- Slides and videos may be from older versions of the class
- I will try to stay 2 days ahead
Brightspace
- Readings
- Example Projects
Discord
- Post questions and help each other
- Synchronous meetings
- Office Hours